I ordered my HDTV service from DirecTV on Monday. They promised to have a technician out for the install on the afternoon of Friday the 9th … just in time to don our England replica jerseys and watch the first World Cup games this weekend. The hours clicked by this afternoon. Nobody showed. I finally rang up DirecTV to find out the installer’s ETA. Needless to say, I was livid with the service rep’s reply …
“We don’t have you scheduled for an install today,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I replied. “They promised that my new satellite dish and HDTV receiver would be installed this afternoon.”
“It’s not showing up in the computer.”
I immediately asked to be put through to a supervisor and was (almost immediately) disappointed by his response.
The supervisor promised nothing, other than a call back, and ended our conversation with “here’s my voicemail number.”
This fellow didn’t call back, of course. And I didn’t bother leaving a voicemail message for him.
The hours marched onward. I finally got around to calling DirecTV back a few hours later and hooked up with an awesome service rep. Lynn apologized for my situation said that I should be able to get my HDTV working tonight, if I picked up a DirecTV HDTV receiver at a local electronics store.
So I flew out at 8:00 PM to buy a DirecTV HDTV box. Blame it on a World Cup run, perhaps … there was but one left on the shelves. $99 and I’m that much closer to HDTV nirvana (or so I thought).
The HDTV receiver’s packaging stated that it came with cables. Alas, it only included S-Video and component cables. The HDMI cable was conspicuously absent. I went with the component cables.
Buzzed through the cabling and install. Quickly got the receiver up and running. Called DirecTV one more time to authorize the new box and card. Quickly ran into a snag, back to square one … no HDTV channels …
while you are watching the video, if you move your mouse to the top of the video the link to youtube is there.